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Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

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Re: Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

#71

Post by wildmXranat »

needusername wrote: post #63
chris_wot wrote: post #27

Oracle is beginning to find they are in trouble. Here's a small example: I'm hearing from a fairly reliable source that quite a few large Australian banks are replacing Oracle (my source didn't say with what). They are citing the enormous cost of the licenses, along with difficulty getting adequate support without paying a fortune. My contact himself is in upper management of a large corporation and Oracle screwed hi…

> it can often be hard to find people who can troubleshoot performance issues. Even highly skilled people face a black box when they work on improving query performance as the CBO is largely a black box that can change from version to version. Without a clear explanation of how the CBO actually makes decisions it's often a bit of a crapshoot when tuning queries. This has not been my experience.

What part of parent has not been your experience ?

I have experience parent's woes and more. That includes having Oracle staff in house doing in-person knowledge transfer. Experience says that Oracle will not provide a qualified person if we call for one as well. Sourcing from their own consultant pool is also a black box crap-shoot.

We also involved Dell and their support team to provide feedback and second opinion on Oracle CBO, query optimization and overall needed knowledge to use their Toad for Oracle performance tools. They literally stopped short of saying: yeah, you need people smarter than us for that.

I still think Oracle is a great product, but it's only fit for large organizations with bottomless budgets. I think we spent something north of $100K on Oracle's E-learning and that was probably the cheapest item on the list.

Re: Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

#72

Post by wildmXranat »

pbasista wrote: post #62
manyxcxi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly (having been through plenty of meetings where this type of stuff happens) it's because Oracle has someone out there spreading the word to The decision makers. The Oracle sales team isn't converting developers, they're in the ear of the person who signs the check. Nobody is out there on the Postgres side doing the same, so that decision maker doesn't even know who they are. Then when someone suggests pgsql fo…

But should not the decision makers be smart enough to see through this? If they sign contracts, they should do a proper research first. Just believing a well-known company which presents their product as "the solution to all your problems" does not seem very clever to me.

You are right, but there's a way around the argument that allows them to still make a bad decision. It's called management by committee. They don't need to provide a good fit-gap analysis, sound points for the plan or quantify why it's better. You will simply hear that a group of smart people have concluded that it's a "good plan" and that they consulted with Oracle and their own experts who are also absolved of any responsibility since lack-of accountability is built-in to their contract.

It will cost a lot in time and dollars to actually get what you want and you will not want to litigate Oracle.

Re: Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

#73

Post by AlexB138 »

chris_wot wrote: post #58
TheLogothete wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comparison with SQL Server is not very sound. SQL Server is MUCH cheaper. I would venture to say it is more performent and is on-par with features (certainly will be after the next realease). Moreover. SQL Server is not brute forced in the way you say Oracle is, especially with CRM. Maybe something like that happens with the ERP products, but much more mildly. The most important difference is that SQL Server has…

The main advantage Oracle has over SQL Server in my opinion is that Oracle has tablespaces and multi-version concurrency control baked in, whereas SQL Server has ONE TempDB and snapshot isolation relying on that one TempDB.

On the nose. SQL Server is a great product, but their MVCC is basically hacked in. They're also lacking in the features Oracle has around their Undo tablespace, and auditing.

Re: Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

#74

Post by jeltz »

chris_wot wrote: post #58
TheLogothete wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comparison with SQL Server is not very sound. SQL Server is MUCH cheaper. I would venture to say it is more performent and is on-par with features (certainly will be after the next realease). Moreover. SQL Server is not brute forced in the way you say Oracle is, especially with CRM. Maybe something like that happens with the ERP products, but much more mildly. The most important difference is that SQL Server has…

The main advantage Oracle has over SQL Server in my opinion is that Oracle has tablespaces and multi-version concurrency control baked in, whereas SQL Server has ONE TempDB and snapshot isolation relying on that one TempDB.

As a PostgreSQL user I dread the idea of running a database without MVCC, even MySQL and SQLite have decent MVCC support.

Re: Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

#75

Post by iamcreasy »

chris_wot wrote: post #56
iamcreasy wrote: post #52

This semester I am taking a DBMS course and the instructor works at one of NASA's NSSDCA center in South Dakota. He mentioned in that class that, this NSSDCA center is in the process of moving away from Oracle to PostgreSQL. The transfer process is going on for over 2 years. Even the book we are following changed their focus from Oracle to MySQL from recent edition.

I'd be asking the lecturer to change yo a different textbook...

What's wrong with the current book?

This is what we are reading : Database Systems: Design, Implementation, & Management 11th Edition

Re: Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

#76

Post by chris_wot »

iamcreasy wrote: post #75
chris_wot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be asking the lecturer to change yo a different textbook...

What's wrong with the current book? This is what we are reading : Database Systems: Design, Implementation, & Management 11th Edition

Anything that uses MySQL as a teaching example is just plain wrong.

Re: Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

#77

Post by chris_wot »

Sven7 wrote: post #49
je42 wrote: post #7

Oracle gets desperate ;)

This has been Oracle's (i.e. Larry Ellison's) sales and marketing M.O. since forever. Read up on why Raymond Lane left the company. And sad part is it works.

Only till it doesn't. One day they'll try this tactic and discover that they've burned so many folks early in their career that a majority will see through the tactic. Or alternatively decision makers will consult with staff that advise them directly and THEY will have been burned.

And the third thing that can happen, which happened with a friend of mine, is that a really bad solution is implemented at a very large ongoing cost, the executive who made the decision leaves (which is what often happens with incompetent executives) and their replacement walks in, sees the disaster, doesn't care about saving his predecessors stupidity and decides to remove the bad solution, and makes sure that the vendor who caused the headache goes to the bottom of the pile when it considerating them during tenders for new business.

You know what they say: it costs less to keep existing business (especially in a saturated marketplace where you are the market leader) than it costs to drum up new business.

Believe me, this is a very short to medium term sales solution. When it goes wrong it's not easy to recover from. When competitors start taking market share from Oracle they'll find it very hard to recover their market share without immense upheaval and systemic change throughout their business. Microsoft learned this the hard way. Oracle's time will come! Can't come soon enough.

Re: Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

#78

Post by chris_wot »

jeltz wrote: post #74
chris_wot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main advantage Oracle has over SQL Server in my opinion is that Oracle has tablespaces and multi-version concurrency control baked in, whereas SQL Server has ONE TempDB and snapshot isolation relying on that one TempDB.

As a PostgreSQL user I dread the idea of running a database without MVCC, even MySQL and SQLite have decent MVCC support.

Then you really don't want to read about escalation locking...but if you want to be horrified visit the following:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms184286(v=sql.1...

Re: Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

#80

Post by salemh »

Sven7 wrote: post #49
je42 wrote: post #7

Oracle gets desperate ;)

This has been Oracle's (i.e. Larry Ellison's) sales and marketing M.O. since forever. Read up on why Raymond Lane left the company. And sad part is it works.

I was interested in reading up on this, and found this article if others are interested: http://www.peoplesoft-planet.com/anatomy-power-play-ray-lane...
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